I think as part of my growing anger about how my dad's work seemed to be affecting me (starting somewhere around 1983 or so, when I moved to another city to attend Bible school and work with Soviet emigrants on the side) was my trying to make sense of dad as to "how he could do this to me" and why I might be having these apparent troubles. I put the "how he cold do this to me" in parentheses because, although it expresses the kind of thing I was thinking - especially earlier on - I think I eventually came to the understanding that a certain unidentifiable (from my vantage point) amount of what I was experiencing was not directly "caused" by him in that any causation would mostly, and to varying degrees, be indirect, with other intentionally acting parties intervening between him and me. Who those parties were, how much my dad might have known about their involvement, and what type of involvement they might have had would have varied depending on the situation. So, to give a clear example of what I mean, dad would have had no influence over the Komsomols when they invited me to Siberia in 1991, but they undoubtedly invited me there because of my dad's work (which he suddenly was retired from 2 months after I got to Siberia).
Nevertheless, I harbored a growing anger towards my dad for "ruining my life", and I'm afraid that I still have some of that anger, although it's largely subdued and has taken backseat to other more pressing current concerns, like how to recover from my recent cervical stenosis and resultant surgery and find a way to supplement my disability income.
As part of this anger I am afraid that I could be rather unkind to my father in my thinking, which I'm sure spilled out from time to time in my words and actions. One of the things that I decided about him in my new-found interest in watching him and figuring him out was that I came to the conclusion that I didn't think he was that "spiritual" of a Christian.
From where I am now I think that even if that were true, and I think there was a certain amount of truth to it, which I'll get to in a bit here, what I did with this thought was not appropriate and I'm afraid it does not put me in a very good light, but I hope you know already that in the process of explaining my life (at least how I see it) I'm not afraid to be open about such flaws or even sins, especially when I think they might be helpful in understanding my life. In my anger I used this conclusion to sort of slam dad as the "judge and jury." I'm not sure he ever knew I thought this about him, but I think a few people could vouch for me having said this - and it would have been more than 10 years ago that I might have verbally expressed this kind of thinking.
But now I need to explain what about dad made me think this way and then I want to tell you about a later transformation I witnessed in him (albeit from a distance). I started thinking like this probably somewhere during my time in Vienna, when I began more in earnest thinking he might be affecting me in more ways than I could ever have imagined. Also, by that time I may have been on a somewhat of a spiritual high and so there was a tinge of spiritual snobbery about my attitude, which is a pretty ugly thing, really, but I think that's a fair representation of it. I began to see that dad didn't read or study the Bible much nor take the lead (as a man of the house should) in saying grace (especially, I mean after us kids had moved out of the house - for good or otherwise). So I began to see him as a good man, but not very spiritual (although sometimes I even doubted how good he could be for me to be experiencing what I was because of him).
First I'll describe the transformation in him, and then the transformation in me.
Some time after dad retired from work he really changed and grew spiritually, including taking a lot more interest in Bible study. I wasn't around for a lot of that (I was in Siberia for the first 6 years after his retirement) so I don't know how or when this change happened, but it did and I'm pretty certain about that. To me it felt like there was some kind of a connection between his retiring and the spiritual growth - and by connection, I mean more of a [partial] cause-affect connection than just a correlation connection. I'm not sure of the mechanism involved in that relationship but I have two theories, either or both of which could be true, I think:
- The nature of his work was somehow a hindrance to his spiritual growth and/or
- The time demands of his work was a hindrance to his spiritual growth.
Now to me. I think our spiritual growth, mine and my dad's is indirectly and inversely related that is, my experiences largely caused by dad's former work took their toll on me and made me more and more disillusioned with organized Evangelical Christianity and that affected my spiritual life. But this is not "brain surgery" (i.e., something so difficult to understand), because the connection is clearly stated in the Bible:
"10He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him. 11But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes." (I John 2:10-11)
I can't love what I think is hopelessly corrupt and intentionally manipulative. So wherever I live I try to find a church that isn't tainted by the horrors of what I've experience and seen. And by "tainted" I mean doesn't embody the same kind of thinking and attitudes that permitted what happened in Vienna (and to a much lesser degree in Russia) to happen. And, in my mind, even being nonchalant about those things smacks of being tainted. The Vienna mission knew that if a newer member could partake in socializing someone even newer, that person had grasped and internalized the organizational norms. And my version of that is that if a church isn't willing to stand up for what is right and try to change things (as "iron sharpeneth iron" (Prov. 27:17)), then they really don't believe that these things are wrong. Right? I think so. So where do I go (to church I mean)? That's the million dollar question.
Through all this, though, I've never doubted my faith, the Bible or Christianity, just institutionalized Christianity. But even so, my spirituality has suffered, I think. To me, if I go to a church I must have an openness to grow spiritually from that relationship and I must also trust the Church to lead me in a direction that I think is spiritual. Barring those conditions, any relationship I have with a church will only be tangential. Or, maybe I should just stay home and content myself with reading Jacques Ellul.
That's not why I missed church this morning, though. I woke up around 7:00 and was still tired, so I pulled the CPAP off, turned over and slept for 3 more hours. Usually if I do that I only sleep for 1 or 2 more hours, either of which would have allowed me to make it to church, but 3 hours made it too late.
***
Enough about that... Our next text is:
Starr, Jennifer A., & Fondas, Nanette. (1992). A model of entrepreneurial socialization and organization formation. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 17(1), 67-76.
This article has a somewhat different context - that of socialization and organizational culture development in the context of starting a new business. Nevertheless, this text addresses the issue of motivation, which I don't think has been adequately addressed elsewhere, except that we now know that I did not have a high need for feedback and that I'm field independent.
***
I'm skipping sections, as I'm doing more and more since I've already covered a lot of territory regarding socialization and so there's bound to be more redundancy of thought. I'm picking this text up in the section "A Model of Entrepreneurial Socialization," sub-section "New Entrepreneur Socialization."
"The organizational socialization literature emphasizes the adaptive processes that occur in the early stages of the newcomer's experience after entering a new organization. The newcomer's experience is viewed as an ongoing, sensemaking process, whereby initial expectations and experiences are revised and reinterpreted within the new organizational context (Louis, 1980, in press). The newcomer's critical tasks include mastering job basics, building role identity, building relationships, updating one's frame of reference (finding out how and why things are done), mapping key people and social networks in the organization, positioning oneself in networks, and learning the organizational vernacular (Louis, 1980). The objective is to develop strategies that reduce cognitive uncertainty, improve perceptions and interpretations, and enable the newcomer to gain control and acceptance in the new environment." (p. 69-70)
A lot of this rather encyclopedic summary of socialization has been covered elsewhere, but not all of it. I will take the opportunity, however, to hammer in the fact that mastering the job basics didn't involve much (maybe I should have asked if I should take a speed reading class before arriving, instead of a class to learn software used by the mission).
I'll take these activities individually:
"Role identity." As I've said before, I was shocked at how totally the monicker "secretary" seemed to define my relationship to the mission and life while with the mission. But I did also need to accept that that seemed to be where they were starting from ("seemed" is key here; whether or not this was actually the case, I don't know, so I can only go by how things seemed to me). Then I could try to accept their definition of me, in total or in part, or try to negotiate a different understanding of me (apart from a role within the mission) and also my role within the mission, and this "different understanding" could have ranged from only very slightly different from how they'd apparently understood and pegged me to something completely different. Needless to say, this could only have been done effectively as I learned more about the mission and how it operated. And even then whether or how much I could have affected their image of me at all was the other issue.
"Building relationships." I was certainly open to and even eager to develop relationships within the mission, and I don't think there was ever particularly a question there, although, as I've said before, how much I felt like I could relate to the other secretaries had a limit and this seemed to be a very important type of relationship to the mission. Eventually, though, the more I experienced of the mission the less candid I think I was in my relationship with others, so that my interactions might have revealed less and less of what I was really thinking and my concerns about the mission.
"Updating one's frame of reference (finding out how and why things are done)." In the Vienna context this seems to be virtually identical to "sensemaking," since this (especially the "why" part) dominated my confusion about the mission.
"Mapping key people and social networks." This would have been part of my trying to make sense of what made the organization tick, because it seemed that these people were the real powerhouses behind the organization, although mid-level leadership also played an important role in defining their departments and influencing their underlings, and also in being conduits for supporting the leadership of those above them. This isn't particularly surprising, although in a total institution this kind of thing has the potential of having more far flung impact than in other types of organizations. In this I might have been at a somewhat of an advantage compared to new comers in other positions, because my position gave me a better vantage point to watch the top leadership. That is, my boss was second in command and his office was right adjacent to mine, and the director and his secretary were right across the hall from us. In addition, I also got to know my boss's wife and family better than any other family in the organization, all because of my being his secretary (at least part of the time I was with the mission). So if I was going to figure out what made the mission tick, I might have been able to see things closer to the source than if I'd been someone else's secretary down in the basement, for example.
In any case, I think I felt that understanding these power relationships within the organization was fairly important to understanding what made the organization tick. But, at the same time, I didn't limit my observations just to them, especially at the beginning when everything was ambiguous. And since I had so much trouble making sense of the organization I think I tried to process (mentally) all the input I could.
"Positioning oneself in networks." I never have been very good at "positioning" myself. That kind of office politics never particularly interested me and, besides, it wouldn't fit the naive side of my personality. I don't think either of my parents are/were like this either. They have/had a lot of integrity and just believed in doing the best you could. I can't see either of them playing office politics, and I don't think any of us "kids" are like that either. The world might snarl and consider us easy pushovers, but I think of it differently: that it displays a certain respect for people, integrity and lack of meanness. Besides, I don't think that the opposite of "positioning oneself" is being a "pushover"; rather I see it more akin to respecting others as you'd like to be respected.
Other than that, however, there was the issue of trying to figure out where I did fit in the broader scheme of things, whether in the formal hierarchy/power/communication sense or in the informal hierarchy/power/communication sense or some hybrid of the two. I think this was part of how I understood what kind of an identity the mission had prepared for me to fit into when I arrived. To a certain extent I did want to correct erroneous aspects of that prefabricated identity, but on the other had, the more I learned about the mission the more I also realized that it might be wise to not reveal everything. And I'd like to use an illustration that I thought of long ago but didn't see where I could use it:
In 1979, the summer between my freshmen and sophomore years at college I house sat for my Grandmother who'd married a man from St. Petersburg, Florida. They spent half the year there and the other half in Seattle at her house. While in St. Petersburg I worked and also took a course at the local community college, where I met and befriended a Colombian gal. She had a Colombian friend studying English in the city who wanted to get out of the dorm, where Spanish was spoken all the time, and my friend asked if her friend could live with me. After getting approval from my grandmother we spent the next month living together before I returned to Seattle at the end of the summer. She really was pretty much a beginning in English and I knew virtually no Spanish, so our relationship was quite interesting. I worked at Pizza Hut and she knew the word "pizza" and I knew the word "cucaracha" from a song I'd learned in elementary school music, so we used to joke about having cucaracha pizza. One time when we were out in her car (running an errand or something) she got stopped by the police for speeding. Although she knew perfectly well what was happening (her English wasn't that limited), she broke out in fluent nonstop Spanish when the officer came up to her window. She made like she didn't know any English at all and I think she just got a warning or something.
But I present this illustration because it might help you understand some of how I carried myself for a lot of my time with the mission, namely, not letting on to what I understood and thought. In this way, I think they eventually thought I might have more potential than they thought, they didn't know everything, and, to a certain extent, I wanted it that way too. That is, I didn't want them to know what I was thinking or the implications of some of my prior background that gave me the framework and basis for my thoughts.
So getting back to "positioning of networks," I don't think I particularly did this, except I did try to wriggle out of the confining secretarial straight jacket they seemed to have prepared for me. Another way to exemplify this is by the fact that I did a fair amount of entertaining (on my own initiative), but I don't think it would be possible to see any of that as "positioning" myself, and certainly not taken as a whole. However, I did broaden my net way beyond secretaries, including others in the mission, people from other missions (including my sending mission), Austrians and people from other nationalities (like the Canadian conservatory student I befriended).
"Learning organizational vernacular." I think there was an "organizational vernacular" in the sense of things sometimes having a direct and indirect meaning. But somewhere along the line I think I realized that I wasn't ever going to really understand that until I took that "leap of faith" and submitted myself to the total institution that the mission was. And I thought/think that was so because the whole purpose of it - the vernacular - was that it served as part of the security-oriented identity and norms of the mission. So it was intentionally difficult for outsiders to understand. And, believe me, it's difficult to work in a total institution where you have no hope of ever understanding the organizational vernacular because of your unwillingness to accept their ways and trust them.
Okay, now to the last sentence of this text: "The objective is to develop strategies that reduce cognitive uncertainty, improve perceptions and interpretations, and enable the newcomer to gain control and acceptance in the new environment."
I did want to do all that... but only under certain conditions. That is, I wanted to develop strategies that reduce cognitive uncertainty, improve perceptions and interpretations, and enable me to gain control and acceptance in the new environment ... so long as I didn't have to do anything that was contrary to my well-thought-out and strongly held beliefs and values. As long as nothing along those lines was asked of me I did want all these things; but not at the cost of my well-thought-out and strongly held beliefs and values. In this way I could go along with the mission to a certain extent, but no further, unless I became convinced along the way that what the mission wanted did not entail going against well-thought-out and strongly held beliefs and values. Is it necessary to say plainly that I never felt that the mission's requirements didn't entail transgressing my well-thought-out and strongly held beliefs and values?
So it's not that I didn't want these things (reduce cognitive uncertainty, etc.), but that there was something I wanted more than I wanted those things, and that was to not contradict and/or give up my well-thought-out and strongly held beliefs and values. Giving them up was out of the question because there was virtually no chance the mission was going to sit down and, without using the strong arm of force, have a nice little egalitarian chat with me about these things. And I learned that pretty early on, at least by my 5th month with the mission.
***
I need to take a break and get on with other things for a while.
